Inaugural Lecture - Professor Neil Mitchell (International Relations)

Neil
Mitchell joined the School of Public Policy at UCL in September 2011. He was previously professor of politics and
Sixth Century Chair at the University of Aberdeen and before that taught at the
University of New Mexico in the United States. His research interests include business and other non-state actors,
conflict, and human rights. His latest book is Democracy’s Blameless Leaders (NYU
Press, March 2012).

Accountability and
how democracies manage the blame for human rights violations will be the focus
of this lecture. Of all systems we expect the most of democracies. But there has been little analysis of whether
the assumptions of scholars and democratic leaders about the relationship
between democracy and accountability are supported by performance in this
policy area. The broad theoretical claim of the talk is that the analysis of
delegation, developed by economists and public policy scholars with other topics
on their minds, offers an elegant and policy-rich path of inquiry, and
political science has something to offer in return.